As advocates for free exercise of religion, civil rights, and religious pluralism, we are deeply concerned that President Trump’s recently signed Executive Order “Promoting Free Speech and Religious Liberty” will serve to limit, not protect, religious freedom. The order was signed on May 4, 2017, in a ceremony that included Christian musician Steven Curtis Chapman and statements by Pentecostal televangelist Paula White, Baptist Pastor Jack Graham, Catholic Archbishop Donald Wuerl, Rabbi Marvin Heir, and Vice President Mike Pence. While the executive order—unlike a prior leaked draft—does not single out particular religious beliefs for special protection, we are nevertheless concerned that the broad discretion it offers to federal agencies will have the effect of favoring majoritarian faiths at the expense of religious minorities.

Religious Liberty Guidance Provision

Section 4 of the order directs the Attorney General to “issue guidance interpreting religious liberty protections in Federal law.” This provision suggests that the administration plans to take an aggressive approach in affirmatively interpreting federal religious accommodation laws, like the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), to grant exemptions from federal law to religious objectors. Religious exemptions are often essential to protecting religious minorities when neutral laws and policies unintentionally burden their beliefs and practices. For example, religious exemptions have ensured that Sikhs, Muslims, and Jews in the military and other workplaces are able to wear religious headwear despite uniform rules. However, President Trump’s order signals an intent to construe religious exemptions more broadly than in the past; such wide discretion is likely to disproportionately protect majoritarian beliefs, perhaps at the expense of religious minorities and other marginalized communities. The Executive Order’s signing ceremony was representative of a larger and pervasive bias in the way that this administration has interpreted “religious liberty”: neglecting, if not, affirmatively denying, the rights of religious minorities – especially Muslims.

So too, this administration is committed to expanding too broadly the notion of religious liberty for some people of faith over others. In particular, inappropriately-broad exemptions run the risk of allowing religious objectors to become religious enforcers, and to impose their views on third parties. Faith-based exemptions from health, employment, and civil rights laws would protect religious health care providers, employers, and landlords, at the expense of workers, patients, and tenants who do not share their beliefs. It is important to note that overly-broad interpretations of religious exemptions threaten religious liberty itself, even among Christians, since even members of the same faith often hold divergent views on many moral and philosophical issues. For example, many Christians as a matter of their faith support reproductive rights for women, equality for LGBTQ people, and religious pluralism in the workplace, public accommodations and elsewhere. Nevertheless, religious minorities are at particular risk of being coerced into abiding by or supporting dominant religious beliefs. This is especially true for minority religions that already face significant mistrust and discrimination, including Muslims, Sikhs, and nonbelievers. Other communities—including LGBTQ people, unmarried families, and those seeking reproductive health care— may also be harmed if the DOJ takes an overly-expansive approach to federal religious exemption law that allows religious objectors to impose their beliefs on others.

We are especially troubled by the fact that the order directs sensitive religious exemption decisions to be made by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who has a long history of supporting Islamophobic measures, organizations, and beliefs. This history includes:

In December 2015, then-Senator Sessions voted against a nonbinding amendment seeking to prevent a religious litmus test for people entering into the United States. During that vote, Senator Sessions said: “Many people are radicalized after they enter. How do we screen for that possibility, if we cannot even ask about an applicant’s views on religion?” Following the horrific shooting that targeted LGBTQ Latinx people at a nightclub in Orlando, Sessions warned Americans on FOX News Sunday to “slow down” on foreign born admissions into the United States, particularly those with Islamic backgrounds. “It’s a real part of the threat that we face and if we can’t address it openly and directly and say directly that there is an extremist element within Islam that’s dangerous to the world and has to be confronted.” In an interview in June 2016, Sessions said of U.S. immigration policy, “We need to use common sense with the who-what-where of the threat. It is the toxic ideology of Islam.”

In October 2013, Senator Sessions asRanking Member of the Senate Budget Committee sent a letter to theNational Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in part demanding a justification for why the NEH was “promoting” Islamic cultures at the expense of Christian and Jewish cultures. The purpose of NEH’s Muslim Journeys program is to “offering resources for exploring new and diverse perspectives on the people, places, histories, beliefs, and cultures of Muslims in the United States and around the world.”

Sessions has also associated himself with anti-Muslim hate groups. In 2015, Sessions accepted the “Keeper of the Flame” award from the Center for Security Policy, whose leader Frank Gaffney has advanced the conspiracy theory that President Obama is Muslim and whose reporting the FBI has said “overstated” any threat Muslim observances pose to America. In 2014, Sessions accepted the “Annie Taylor Award” from the David Horowitz Freedom Center and he attended the group’s annual “Restoration Weekend” retreats in 2008, 2010 and 2013. The Southern Poverty Law Center, a group that tracks hate movements in the United States, labels David Horowitz “the godfather of the modern anti-Muslim movement.”

While Sessions has expressed hostility towards Muslims, he has long supported writing conservative Christian beliefs about sex, marriage, and reproduction into law. In one interview, he expressed doubt about admitting into the country Muslims who hold conservative views about sex and sexuality, suggesting that immigrants should be asked if they “respect minorities such as women and gays.” Despite this, he has been an ardent opponent of LGBTQ equality and reproductive rights, and was a sponsor of the First Amendment Defense Act (FADA), a religious exemption law that would create special protections for those who believe that sex should only take place within a cisgender, different-sex marriage. Thus, we hold deep reservations that Attorney General Sessions will be willing and able to interpret religious exemption laws equally for all religions and beliefs, and will adequately consider the burdens that religious exemptions place on third parties.

Johnson Amendment Provision

The potential ramifications of the recently signed EO are especially worrying, given that President Trump joins a long line of Republican figures who support repeal of the Johnson Amendment, a federal law that prohibits tax-deductible non-profits (including universities, charities, and houses of worship) from participating or intervening in “any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office.” Recent examples include the U.S. House’s Free Speech Fairness Act (which is supported by 57 Republican Representatives) and its companion bill in the U.S. Senate (which is supported by 5 Republican Senators).

For years, conservative political activists have fought against this provision, arguing that it amounts to an unconstitutional limitation of the First Amendment rights of religious leaders and houses of worship to comment on political activities. In contrast, political observers note that the repeal of the amendment, combined with the tax deductibility of 501(c)(3) donations, would effectively lead to taxpayers subsidizing political activism from houses of worship and other non-profits.

If Congress repealed the Johnson Amendment, or if President Trump implemented a more robust executive order on the topic, the effect would be strikingly asymmetrical. Christian and Jewish clergy (and other politically-secure religious traditions) would be empowered to bring faith and politics together at the very moment that Muslim clergy worry about the growing net of suspicion and surveillance being cast on their community. Unlike their counterparts in other faiths, Muslim clergy are primarily fearful of the local, state, and federal intelligence operations that target their houses of worship, and not without cause. Muslims already face increased scrutiny from law enforcement officials. For example, the National Security Agency and the FBI allegedly tracked email accounts of five Muslim American leaders between 2006 and 2008, according to an NSA spreadsheet of email addresses disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. More recently, over 100 people contacted the Council on American Islamic Relations to report that they were visited by the FBI prior to the 2016 election.

While President Trump’s May 4th executive order, self-styled as “Protecting Free Speech and Religious Liberty,” was largely symbolic, it has disturbing implications for how measures that purportedly advance religious liberty can promote majoritarian religious institutions, while harming the minority faiths most in need of protection. Hopefully, the order isn’t a harbinger of more meaningful and substantive measures in the months and years to come.

Trump’s second attempt at banning travel from certain Muslim-majority countries is clearly written to avoid being struck down under the Establishment Clause. Most notably, it no longer contains provisions that preference entry for religious minorities—language the President himself admitted was intended to prioritize entry for Christian rather than Muslim refugees.

So why isn’t the new EO constitutional, at least with regard to First Amendment claims? Because cutting its most obviously discriminatory provision doesn’t fix the fact that the new EO was passed with the same invalid purpose as the President’s first attempt—to reduce Muslim immigration into the U.S. When a candidate campaigns for nearly two years on the promise of banning, profiling, and even registering Muslims, that is context that a court can—and should—consider in evaluating whether his actions are motivated by religious animus or legitimate security concerns.

In 2005, the Supreme Court issued two decisions on the question of whether displaying the Ten Commandments in or near a courthouse violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The cases came out split, with one display upheld and the other held unconstitutional. The takeaway? Context and history matter.

These decisions serve as helpful background for why a quick fix to Trump’s Executive Order on Immigration doesn’t resolve all the EO’s constitutional problems.

In one of the cases, McCreary County v. ACLU, the displays at issue were the third in a series of exhibits that had been repeatedly challenged as unconstitutional. The first displays—installed in two Kentucky county courthouses—were large, gold-framed copies of the Ten Commandments, with a citation to the Book of Exodus. In response to a suit by the ACLU, the counties expanded the displays to include additional documents in smaller frames, each with a religious theme, including the “endowed by their Creator” passage from the Declaration of Independence and the national motto, “In God We Trust.”

When a District Court preliminarily enjoined both the original and the expanded displays, the counties installed a third version, this time consisting of nine framed documents including the Ten Commandments, Magna Carta, Declaration of Independence, and Bill of Rights. In explaining its decision to strike down even this seemingly acceptable display, the Supreme Court noted: “the purpose apparent from government action can have an impact more significant than the result expressly decreed” (emphasis added).

In other words, the counties weren’t fooling anyone.

In order to be upheld under the Establishment Clause, a government action must have a valid secular purpose. While courts typically give deference to the secular intent proffered by legislatures, the purpose has to be “genuine, not a sham.” In this case, it was obvious to the Court that the counties’ intent in creating the third round of displays was no different than their intent for the original display: they “were simply reaching for any way to keep a religious document on the walls of courthouses constitutionally required to embody religious neutrality.”

In contrast, the Court in Van Orden v. Perry held that it was permissible for Texas to accept and display a Ten Commandments statue donated by a civic organization on the state capitol grounds, alongside 17 other monuments and 22 historical markers. In this case, there was no history indicating a legislative intent to endorse or advance religion.

The history of Trump’s two Executive Orders recalls the counties’ efforts in McCreary to water down a religious display simply to meet legal approval, without changing its underlying intent. In the years leading up to the EO, President Trump repeatedly pledged to ban Muslims from entering the country. (He also made comments supporting Muslim profiling, the creation of a Muslim registry, and the closure of mosques.) Trump sometimes varied his language, calling his plan “extreme vetting” or emphasizing its application to “terror nations” rather than Muslim-majority nations.

After the issuance of the first order, however, Trump advisor Rudy Giuliani openly admitted that the President intended to craft a Muslim ban that would withstand judicial scrutiny. When the ban was enjoined, Trump stated in a press conference that the administration could “tailor the [new] order to that decision and get just about everything, in some ways more.” White House advisor, Stephen Miller, also stated that the new EO contained “mostly minor, technical differences,” and would “have the same, basic policy outcome for the country.”

Thus, despite the elimination of the explicit religious preference, there’s no indication that the new order should be treated any differently from the last one when it comes to determining whether the administration had a valid, secular, non-discriminatory purpose in issuing the EO.

This is certainly not to say that Trump can never pass a law on immigration or national security that won’t violate the Establishment Clause. The McCreary Court explained that it did not hold that the counties’ “past actions forever taint any effort on their part to deal with the subject matter.” However it does mean that Trump cannot avoid the ample and longstanding evidence that his EO is intended to be a Muslim ban simply by removing the language that most clearly identifies it as one.

Trump’s latest executive order highlights what is becoming standard practice within his administration: obscuring the destructive impact of an action on some marginalized communities by couching it in a feigned concern for “protecting” others.

At the tail end of a relentless first week of presidential action targeting the environment, immigrants, reproductive health care, Native communities, and the free speech rights and employment of federal workers, President Trump signed an executive order to halt refugee resettlement and travel from seven Muslim-majority countries.

The order suspends the entire U.S. refugee resettlement program and bans entry of persons from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.

On the whole, the order is dangerous, misguided, and deeply rooted in this administration’s commitment to a xenophobic, racist, and Islamophobic agenda. However, two sections in particular highlight a manipulative tactic that is becoming standard practice within the Trump administration: obscuring the destructive impact of an action on some marginalized communities by couching it in a feigned concern for “protecting” others.

Section one of the order states that “the United States [will] not admit those who engage in acts of bigotry and hatred … or those who would oppress members of one race, one gender, or one sexual orientation.”

Trump’s attempt to couch this order in paternalistic,hollowconcern for LGBTQ communities, communities of color, and women is both dangerous and insincere. It directly ignores the lived experiences of Muslims within those communities, falsely implies that Islam’s principles are inconsistent with equality and justice, and is in direct contrast with the hostility Trump, his administration, and his appointees have exhibited toward these communities domestically and abroad. It is also a clear attempt to exploit support for these communities in a way that obscures the order’s oppressive effect on Muslim immigrants and refugees.

Trump has made clear, through his campaign rhetoric, cabinet appointments, and vice presidential selection, that he has no interest in protecting the rights of women, communities of color, or LGBTQ people. Despite superficial statements claiming he strongly supports LGBTQ rights, Trump, Vice President Pence, and most of their cabinet appointees have a strong commitment to laws that would harm LGBTQ and reproductive rights, including the First Amendment Defense Act and similar state bills. Trump also campaigned heavily on a “law and order” platform, which has demonized undocumented immigrants and communities of color by pushing forward a false narrative about the problem of “inner-city” crime—a term that has long been coded as racist and intended to target Black communities in particular.

Secondly, the order’s alleged commitment to rejecting bigotry rings particularly false because it is apparently aimed at prioritizing the resettlement of Christians in Muslim-majority countries. While it does not name Christians explicitly, the order directs the secretary of the State Department, in consultation with the secretary of Homeland Security, “to prioritize refugee claims made by individuals on the basis of religious-based persecution, provided that the religion of the individual is a minority religion in the individual’s country of nationality.” Absent from the order, of course, is any prioritization of the communities Trump claims he is invested in protecting from supposedly dangerous Muslim refugees and immigrants.

Last week, Trump told the Christian Broadcasting Network that he intended to help persecuted Christians with his new refugee policies, because, he claims, they have been “horribly treated” in the refugee resettlement process, despite evidence showing that Christian and Muslim refugees have been approved for resettlement at roughly the same rate in recent history.

As others have also pointed out, although Trump has claimed a strong support for “religious liberty,” the selective religious beliefs that he supports seem to be grounded more in a self-serving version of Christian nationalism than justice for communities directly harmed by his particular brand of white, cis-hetero Christian supremacy. Although there might be a vocal minority of Christian leaders speaking out in support of reducing or banning Muslims from entering the United States, “leaders of nearly every Christian denomination, along with those of other faiths” criticized the action, which they argued does “not reflect the teachings of the Bible, nor the traditions of the United States,” reported The Atlantic.

During the weekend, large-scale protests erupted across the country, prompting federal judges in New York, Massachusetts, Washington State, and Virginia to hold emergency hearings, which resulted in temporary orders halting enforcement of the order. Despite judicial intervention, there continues to be reports of people and families, even those with visas and green cards, being detained for hours without food or access to lawyers at airports across the country—and some have already been deported. Adding to the confusion, Trump has continued to defend the order and the Department of Homeland Security has issued a statement emphasizing that despite court orders, the ban will stay in effect.

The framing of this order should serve as a reminder to advocates, journalists, and others to remain vigilant in calling out and resisting Trump’s attempts to pit some of our important justice and equality interests against others—particularly when the communities in question are not inherently at odds, and the administration has no intent in furthering the substantive rights of thosecommunities.

Columbia Law School’s Public Rights/Private Conscience Project joins with thousands of lawyers, law professors, and legal organizations across the country in announcing that President Donald Trump’s recent Executive Order writing a religious preference into U.S. policy is unconstitutional. The Order—issued late Friday afternoon, hours after the administration recognized Holocaust Remembrance Day—suspends the entire U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, declares that “entry of nationals of Syria as refugees is detrimental to the interests of the United States,” and cuts off entry into the U.S. for certain nationals of majority-Muslim countries. Several provisions of the order are clearly intended to block immigration by Muslim refugees while providing a preference for some Christian refugees to escape violence and persecution by resettling in the U.S. The Executive Order amounts to both a form of state sponsored discrimination against persons of one particular faith and a religious preference for persons of another faith, in violation of the First Amendment of the Constitution.

While the Refugee Admissions program is suspended, Trump’s Executive Order nevertheless allows entry of refugees on a case-by-case basis if the administration deems their admission “in the national interest,” specifically mentioning members of minority religions abroad. When and if the program is reinstated, the Order directs the agencies to “prioritize” members of minority religions. The Order also directs agencies to recommend legislation to the President that would “assist with such prioritization.” There is no Constitutionally-legitimate reason why the U.S. should prioritize the entry particular religious groups, or determine that the entry of certain religious believers is or is not in the “national interest.” While written in ostensibly neutral language, it is apparent that the Order’s preference for refugees who are religious minorities in their country of origin is intended to shut out Muslim refugees.

Current federal law prohibits any preference, priority, or discrimination in the issuance of immigrant visas on account of the applicant’s race, sex, nationality, place of birth, or place of residence – religion is not on the list, 8 U.S.C. § 1152(a)(1)(A). Yet, under the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, the new Trump immigration Executive Order is clearly unconstitutional. The state may not “act[] with the intent of promoting a particular point of view in religious matters,” nor may it “aid, foster, or promote one religion or religious theory against another.” Similarly, the state’s laws and policies must be neutral with respect to religion and between religions – that is, it may not favor adherents of one religion over another. The Court, and Justice Kennedy in particular, has taken the view that the Establishment Clause together with the Free Exercise Clause embrace an anti-persecution principle – expressly linking the religion clauses to the Equal Protection clause’s non-discrimination norm. In the words of Chief Justice Rehnquist, “we have sometimes characterized the Establishment Clause as prohibiting the State from ‘disapprov[ing] of a particular religion.’” Thus, there are many grounds on which to challenge the new anti-immigrant Executive Order, both for persons holding valid immigrant visas and for those seeking new visas or refugee status. One of those grounds is that this odious new policy violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

While the Order leaves open the confounding questions of what constitutes a religious “minority” considering the great diversity of beliefs and practices within major world religions, as well as how the State will identify religious adherents, it is clear from both the face of the Order and the context around its creation that Trump’s actions are intended to discriminate based on religious belief. President Trump has pledged to instate a Muslim ban throughout his campaign, and he has now taken a significant step to fulfill this promise. “At its core, the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment forbids the U.S. government from determining which religions or religious beliefs are or are not acceptable, desirable, or American,” said Elizabeth Reiner Platt, Director of PRPCP. “This Order violates that crucial limitation.”

“It is alarming that one of the Trump Administration’s first policies is to issue a religious litmus test for refugees and immigrants seeking entry to the U.S.,” observed Katherine Franke, Sulzbacher Professor of Law and Faculty Director of PRPCP. “If the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution stands for anything it is that the state must neither prefer or discriminate members of any particular religious tradition when it issues policy.”